The Rage of Citizen Agbetu

Toyin
Agbetu, the Nigerian founder of the African rights campaign organisation,
Ligali, was recently in the news for disrupting the slavery abolition
anniversary ceremonies at Westminster Abbey. He had risen to protest
the sanitized and elliptical official version of the abolition story
in an occasion at which the Queen and royal family, the Prime Minister
and many distinguished others were present. Toyin Agbetu was arrested
for his action. considers
his Westminster intervention in the light of a continuing struggle
for African emancipation.

There
are iconic moments, occasions with history wrapped around them.
The human story is full of such moments – in its progress,
in its many wanderings. Louise Brown crying her way out of a test
tube. Neil Armstrong on the moon taking one giant leap for mankind.
Mandela free at last, apartheid driven from the streets. And the
human genome moment. There are these kinds of marvellous moments,
and there are others, also iconic, infamy reeking from their dark…
Times of outstanding terror. Auschwitz revealed. Camp Delta, Guatanamo
Bay. Such other iconic places from our epic concentration camp narrative.
Shark Island, Namibia, its discovered skulls, bleached white, blood
drained, enough to stir the rage in Citizen Agbetu. The Rape of
Nanking. Rwanda screaming with the blood of its Tutsi dead. Armenians
trekking to their death in Ottoman Turkey. My Lai. Bosnia. Biafra…

History is not always friendly. There is perhaps too much memory,
and so much of it quite hurtful. Much of life lives by removing
itself from death: by not knowing, not hearing, not seeing, mostly
by lying to itself. But deceit is the great poverty. A life of
secrets is a life in chains. Angers that insist from the past,
suppressed, become our shadows, trail our days with their dark
malice, their wounding tobacco presence. A place from the human
past may never know love. Many avoid there. Others like Agbetu
bestride its pain, pointing and pleading, not letting go. Like
every bearer of grim news, he has something to say most prefer
not to hear. And there is comfort in not knowing – but also
uncertainty. A forbidden place of memory is fertile ground for
the farming of accursed futures. Vampire histories live after
their death. Bloody histories scream for justice – or more
blood. They are our inherited grief. Their poison is already in
our breaths, Citizen Agbetu will have us know. We already inhale.
That is not the choice. The question is when and how to exhale
the deaths we live.

We are defined by our iconic moments, sometimes defiled by them.
Of occasion and history, recline then and regard this spectacle
of one contemporary African in London. Agbetu – in all its
syllables as resonant an African name as any. His heart, unyielding
as his name, burns with the restlessness of his African soul in
England. And it is the season of bad consciences. Two hundred
years of the Abolition. Those who matter in political England
are gathered in Westminster Abbey – most of Her Majesty’s
government. Sobriety is the official code. People wear nobility
like a fixed smile at a time like this. The Archbishop usually
throws a good party. He does it on behalf of God and country,
his famous Abbey awash with occasion, generosity, and good feeling.
Her Majesty is also present with family. Pomp is not quite with
circumstance as it can be, as it used to be. This should be about
slavery not about empire.

In England, however, nothing is without its echoes of empire,
and Citizen Agbetu knows this. He is invited too, one of about
two thousand guests at this occasion. If only he would remain
silent, maintain the peace, he could be mistaken for one of the
‘High Commissioners’ present – representing
Her Majesty’s postcolonial family of nations. But Agbetu
is not that kind of guest. He knows there will be prayers and
speeches. And the inevitable history lesson: how the British abolished
slavery, 1807. The abolition story, as retold, with Wilberforce
as the Christ figure, has the feel of Christmas about it. It is
intended to. But in Agbetu it is not quite Christmas, not really
the season of peace on earth and goodwill towards all. He is at
this Westminster event on behalf of his African rights campaign
group, Ligali.

He knows there will be much spin on the abolition story, which
will echo from the Abbey pulpit. This would be another political
moment not a moment of truth. He knows even more than that. He
has seen it in the eyes of the speechmakers: No one will say sorry.
Around him things will move at their desired pace, and all that
movement will bring no change. This event at the Abbey will happen,
and others like it, all telling the tale of how a benevolent empire
freed its African slaves. But no one will say sorry! They will
say they wish it never happened. They will say in hindsight it
was a bad thing to enslave your fellow humans. But there would
be no apology. There will be words. There will be no action. They
will turn to that place of pain, acknowledge it, but refuse to
go there. They will leave the matter still unresolved, as potent
a breeder of conflicts and bad consciences as ever. Two hundred
years after the Abolition there would be no volition towards a
proper and permanent settlement, towards genuine reconciliation.
Two hundred years after.

Rage erupts in a moment unknown. Sometimes we are warned, even
prepared, but the moment of rage is all its own. Not that there
is never any hint of agony in a kettle on fire, but that the pressure
when it boils over happens in a moment without signposts. The
rage of Citizen Agbetu was like that. He must have felt like a
slave to occasion that imperial moment at the Abbey, expected
to assent to a story he could neither believe nor own, a story
about his people without his people in it. What uncommon thoughts
might have emboldened this ordinary man to risk his life and seize
the moment? Was he thinking of Sam Sharpe, Dutty Boukman, Sojourner
Truth, Olaudah Equiano, Nanny of the Maroons, Queen Nzinga of
the Mbundu (now Angolans), and others less known, some of them
martyrs of the emancipation, ‘villains’ of the same
story in which Wilberforce is hero, considered runaways or agitators
and hunted to their death?

In that moment before his eruption, while he yet struggled with
the pressure, knowing there would be no apology, did Agbetu also
think of Sarah Baartman? Born 1789, died 1816, most likely of
a syphilitic condition she contracted from captors who eventually
worked her in prostitution. Finally, for her, they had found a
self-fulfilling role for her reputedly outstanding bottom, the
reason for which she was held captive in a foreign land. Her life
was worth nothing. Her bottom was the gold they traded on. Some
called her “Saartje,” others, “the Hottentot
Venus,” derogatory names quite appropriate for the display
animal she became for circuses and scientists. In London and Paris,
she was stripped, gawped at and defined by the size and appearance
of her genitals. continues